As the meeting of the
Russell County Board of Education concluded mid-day Monday, an issue of missing
weaponry was broached by newly elected school board member Gerald Murray.

Murray said that he was aware that the school system has five or six AR-15
semi-automatic rifles and bullet proof vests that are not accounted for.

“I know that at one time we did have them, and if we do still have them, I’d
like to know where they’re at,” Murray said.

Superintendent Pickett said that to the best of his knowledge the school system
never owned them, that the items belonged to the Sheriff’s Office. He also said
his research into the matter did not turn up any records of the school having
purchased them.

“I can’t find any documentation,” said Pickett. “I think it was through a grant
through the sheriff’s department.”

“I know they’re not in the possession of the school system,” Pickett said.

“I know that too,” said Murray. “That’s why it was brought to my attention.”

“That was done through a grant that was given to the resource officers through
the Sheriff’s Department and that was done, I believe about six or seven years
ago,” said Gosser. “And those weapons were purchased by a grant, through a
grant. We never purchased weapons, the school system never purchased them, and
they were furnished through that grant.”

“As rumors go, I’ve been told where they’re at,” said Murray, who did not
elaborate but said it will have to be “verified later on.”

In a later interview with then Sheriff Larry Bennett, he said of the weapons
purchase; “It’s my understanding they were bought for the school system,
through the Sheriff’s Department, for use by school resource officer’s. It was
not the Sheriff’s Office’ money.”

The Student Government Association
at Eastern Kentucky University has produced a video to raise awareness among
elected leaders and the public about the importance of accessible and
affordable higher education, especially for EKU students.

The video, which runs almost four
minutes, features comments from seven Eastern students, including SGA President
and Student Regent Madelyn Street, as well as from EKU President Doug Whitlock
and two staff members. It can be viewed at vimeo.com/m/60347273.

The students talk about financial
obstacles to completing a degree, and the role higher education plays in
improving their lives.

“The Board of Student Body
Presidents reached a decision late last semester to cancel our annual Rally for
Higher Education that is hosted at the State Capitol,” Street said. “We
decided that we would like to take a more personal and respectful approach to
voicing our opinions to the state legislators. It was then decided that
all eight public institutions would develop their own ways of getting our message
across and voicing the opinions of our students.

“I think that this approach shows
that we (student government associations) are trying to take a more
professional stance on the issue,” Street continued. “We are able to appeal to
the legislators on a level that truly shows what we are trying to accomplish.”

In addition to Street, students
featured on the video are: Matthew Greenleaf, John Perrin, Andrew Beasley,
Madison Koller, Chris Ernste and Michael Deaton. Benton Shirey, director of
academic advising, and Brandon Williams, assistant director for student rights
and responsibilities, joined Whitlock in making comments.

The video idea was proposed,
Street said, by SGA Treasurer Elizabeth Horn and then “immediately put into
action” by the SGA Executive Cabinet. Street credited Brandon Shinkle for
the video production.

“It is absolutely essential that
our state government take into consideration how their cuts … place the burden
on our students,” Street said, “especially at Eastern, because we pride
ourselves in providing a low-cost education for students who wouldn't otherwise
be able to receive a degree. We are the future of this state, and we will
ultimately be the ones who contribute economically and socially to Kentucky’s
well-being.

“As SGA President, I want to
challenge the state to not only end higher education budget cuts, but to look
at creating ways for our public institutions to begin receiving more funding. I
am challenging them to come up with new and innovative ways to provide incentives
for universities to earn more funding.”

A charter schools bill is on a steady course to clear the Republican
state Senate but seems sure to stall when it hits the Democratic House.

The
Senate Education Committee on Thursday passed Senate Bill 176 on a
party line vote with majority Republicans voting in favor.The bill would allow a local board of education to designate a persistently low-achieving school as a charter school.
The
only witness for the bill Thursday was a Democratic state
representative from Georgia, Alisha Thomas Morgan, who said she once
opposed charter schools.

“It
wasn’t until I started visiting them and seeing the impact they were
having on kids — particularly low-income kids and students of color —
that I realized that my mind needed to change,” Morgan said.Morgan said Kentucky is one of just seven states that does not allow charter schools in some form.

SB
176 passed on a 6-4 vote with all four Democrats voting no. It now goes
to the Senate floor, where the Republican majority is expected to pass
it.But it then will head to the House Education Committee, where its journey for the 2013 legislative session is likely to end.“I’m
doubtful if there’s much support on the House Education Committee to
get it out of committee,” said House Education Committee Chairman Carl
Rollins. “There are a lot of educators on there, people who’ve worked in
the public schools, and they don’t support the whole concept of charter
schools.”Sharron
Oxendine, who is president of the Kentucky Education Association and
attended Thursday’s meeting, said later that the main problem for
Kentucky public schools has been inadequate funding.

“Instead
of giving resources and attention on a small group of schools, let’s
make them available to every Kentucky kid. Let’s not wait until a school
becomes a persistently low-achieving school before we start paying
attention to it,” she said.But
advocates for HB 176 say they have hope for this session because they
say lawmakers can see the need for improvement, particularly in
Jefferson County schools.“This
bill will require the school district to try other forms of education
for persistently low-achieving schools,” said Hal Heiner, a former
member of the Louisville Metro Council. “In Jefferson County we have 16
of the 17 lowest-performing schools in the state. It’s simply time to
try different forms of education.”

U.S. Secretary of
Education Arne Duncan has long been seen as an administration asset. But
this past week, he's also been the chief spokesman for the White House
claims about the potential impact of sequestration on education jobs.
Now those estimates have run afoul of fact-checkers—and that could
ultimately undermine the administration's effort to make education a
poster child when it comes to the impact of sequestration on domestic
programs.

Some background: On Sunday, the White House released
a set of claims about the number of jobs that would be lost due to
sequestration. We told readers that the numbers were very hard to prove
or disprove—the number of actual jobs or positions lost will depend a
lot on how districts decide to implement the cuts. (That information was
also in our Sequestration FAQ.)...

But, even though it's too early to really get a handle on just how
many, if any, education jobs will be lost thanks to the federal cut,
administration officials have insisted on going out with job-loss
estimates. And now it's beginning to bite them in the rear.

Yesterday, the Washington Post put Duncan through the fact-check ringer—giving
him "Four Pinnochios" for his statements about pink slips already going
out to teachers, which is what the education secretary told Politics
K-12's Michele and other reporters last week.

For the most part, districts haven't sent out staff-reduction notices
yet. The lag makes sense since districts are just beginning to do their
budgets. Most haven't yet figured out whether the federal cuts are
likely to lead to layoffs or frozen positions. But the truth, which is
that the sequester makes programmatic cuts and layoffs possible or
likely, doesn't make for nearly as snappy a sound bite. The Post even
compared Duncan's statements to Susan Rice's comments on Libya, which
ultimately doomed her bid for Secretary of State. Ouch.

Already, Republicans on the Hill are seizing the moment. GOP staff on the Senate Finance Committee sent around the Post's initial fact check in an email to reporters with the subject-line "Shame On Them."

Will the perception that Duncan and the White House are inflating the
job loss estimates ultimately hurt the administration's—and
advocates'—push to ensure that pending education cuts should be part of
the sequester debate?

Knowing
that I’ve been writing a fair amount about various methods for
attributing student achievement to their teachers, several colleagues
forwarded to me the recently released standards of the Council For the
Accreditation of Educator Preparation, or CAEP. Specifically, several
colleagues pointed me toward Standard 4.1 Impact on Student Learning:

4.1.The provider documents, using value-added measures
where available, other state-supported P-12 impact measures, and any
other measures constructed by the provider, that program completers
contribute to an expected level of P-12 student growth.http://caepnet.org/commission/standards/standard4/

Now, it’s one thing when relatively under-informed pundits, think tankers, politicians and their policy advisers pitch a misguided use of statistical information for immediate policy adoption.
It’s yet another when professional organizations are complicit in this
misguided use. There’s just no excuse for that! (political pressure,
public polling data, or otherwise)

The problems associated with attempting to derive any reasonable
conclusions about teacher preparation program quality based on
value-added or student growth data (of the students they teach in their
first assignments) are insurmountable from a research perspective.

Worse, the perverse incentives likely induced by such a policy are
far more likely to do real harm than any good, when it comes to the
distribution of teacher and teaching quality across school settings
within states.

First and foremost, the idea that we can draw this simple line below
between preparation and practice contradicts nearly every reality of
modern day teacher credentialing and progress into and through the
profession:

one teacher prep institution –> one teacher –> one job in one school –> one representative group of students

The modern day teacher collects multiple credentials from multiple
institutions, may switch jobs a handful of times early in his/her career
and may serve a very specific type of student, unlike those taught by
either peers from the same credentialing program or those from other
credentialing programs. This model also relies heavily on minimal to no
migration of teachers across state borders (well, either little or none,
or a ton of it, so that a state would have a large enough share of
teachers from specific out of state institutions to compare). I discuss these issues in earlier posts.

Setting aside that none of the oversimplified assumptions of the
linear diagram above hold (a lot to ignore!), let’s probe the more geeky
technical issues of trying to use VAM to evaluate ed school
effectiveness.

Specifically, this study tries to tease out the problem that arises
when graduates of credentialing programs don’t sort evenly across a
state. In other words, a problem that like ALWAYS occurs in reality!

Researchy language likes to downplay these problems by phrasing them
only in technical terms and always assuming there is some way to
overcome them with statistical tweak or two. Sometimes there just isn’t
and this is one of those times!

Let’s dig in. Here’s a breakdown of the abstract:

In this paper we consider the challenges and implications
of controlling for school contextual bias when modeling teacher
preparation program effects. Because teachers from any one preparation
program are hired in more than one school and teachers are not randomly
distributed across schools, failing to account for contextual factors in
achievement models could bias preparation program estimates.

Okay, that’s a significant problem! Teachers from specific prep
institutions are certainly not likely to end up randomly distributed
across a state, are they? And if they don’t, the estimates of program
effectiveness could be “biased.” That is, the estimates are wrong! Too
high, or to low, due to where their grads went as opposed to how “good”
they were. Okay, so what’s the best way to fix that, assuming you can’t
randomly assign all of the teacher grads to similar schools/jobs?

Including school fixed effects controls for school
environment by relying on differences among student outcomes within the
same schools to identify the program effects. However, the fixed effect
specification may be unidentified, imprecise or biased if certain data
requirements are not met.

That means, that the most legit way to compare teachers across
programs is if you can compare teachers whose first placements are in
the same schools, and ideally where they serve similar groups of kids.
And, you’d have to have a large enough sample size at the lowest level
of analysis – comparable classrooms within school – to accomplish this
goal. So, the best way to compare teachers across prep programs is to
have enough of them, from each and every program, in each school,
teaching similar kids similar subjects at the same grade level, across
grade levels. Hmmmm…. How often are we really likely to meet this data
requirement?

Using statewide data from Florida, we examine whether the
inclusion of school fixed effects is feasible in this setting, the
sensitivity of the estimates to assumptions underlying for fixed
effects, and what their inclusion implies about the precision of the
preparation program estimates. We also examine whether restricting the
estimation sample to inexperienced teachers and whether shortening the
data window impacts the magnitude and precision of preparation program
effects. Finally, we compare the ranking of preparation programs based
on models with no school controls, school covariates and school fixed
effects. We find that some preparation program rankings are
significantly affected by the model specification. We discuss the
implications of these results for policymakers.

With “no school” controls means not accounting at all for differences
in the schools where grads teach. With “covariates” means correcting in
the model for the measured characteristics of the kids in the schools –
so – trying to compare teachers who teach in similar – by measured
characteristics – schools. But, measured characteristics often really
fail to catch all the substantive differences between
schools/classrooms. And where “school fixed” effects means comparing
graduates from different institutions who teach in the same school
(though not necessarily the same types of kids!).

Okay, so the authors tested their “best” methodological alternative
(comparing teachers within schools, by school “fixed” effect) with other
approaches, including making no adjustment for where teachers went, or
making adjustments based on the characteristics of the schools, even if
not matched exactly.

The authors found that the less good alternatives were, to no
surprise, less good- potentially biased. The assumption being that the
fixed effect models are most correct (which doesn’t, however, guarantee
that they are right!).

So, if one can only most legitimately compare teacher prep programs
in cases where grads across programs are concentrated in the same
schools for their first jobs, that’s a pretty severe limitation. How
many job openings are there in a specific grade range in a specific
school in a given year – or even over a five year period? And how likely
is it that those openings can be filled with one teacher each from each
teacher prep institution. But wait, really we need more than one from
each to do any legit statistical comparison – and ideally we need for
this pattern to be replicated over and over across several schools. In
other words, the constraint imposed to achieve the “best case” model in
this study is a constraint that is unlikely to ever be met for more than
a handful of large teacher prep institutions concentrated in a single
metropolitan area (or very large state like Florida).

Other recent studies have not found VAM particularly useful in parsing program effects:

We compare teacher preparation programs in Missouri based
on the effectiveness of their graduates in the classroom. The
differences in effectiveness between teachers from different preparation
programs are very small. In fact, virtually all of the variation in
teacher effectiveness comes from within-program differences between
teachers. Prior research has overstated differences in teacher
performance across preparation programs for several reasons, most
notably because some sampling variability in the data has been
incorrectly attributed to the preparation programs.

Example from Kansas

Let’s use the state of Kansas and graduates over a five year period
from the state’s major teacher producing institutions to see just how
problematic it is to assume that teacher preparation institutions in a
given state will produce sufficient numbers of teachers who teach in the
same schools as graduates of other programs.

All programsSpecific programs
Indeed, the overlap in more population dense states may be more
significant, but still unlikely sufficient to meet the high demands of
the fixed effects specification (where you can only essentially compare
when you have graduates of different programs working in the same school
together, in similar assignments… presumably similar number of years
out of their prep programs).

Strategically Gaming Crappy, Biased Measures of “Student Growth”

In practice, I doubt most schools of ed, or state education agencies
will actually consider how to best model program effectiveness with
these measures. They likely won’t even bother with this technically
geeky question of the fixed effects model, and data demands to apply
that model. Rather, they’ll be taking existing state provided growth
scores or value-added estimates and aggregating them across their
graduates.

Given the varied, often poor quality of state adopted metrics, the
potential for CAEP Standard 4.1 to decay into absurd gaming is quite
high. In fact, I’ve got a gaming recommendation right here for teacher
preparation institutions in New York State.

We know from the state’s own consultant analyzing the growth percentile data that:

We also know from this same technical report that the bias appears to
strengthen with aggregation to the school level. It may also strengthen
with aggregation across similar schools. And this is after conditioning
the model on income status and disability status.

As such, it is in the accreditation interest of any New York State
teacher prep institution to place as many grads as possible into lower
poverty schools, especially those with fewer children with disabilities.
By extension, it is therefore also in the accreditation interest of NY
State teacher prep institutions to reduce the numbers of teachers they
prepare in the field of special education. As it turns out, the New York
State growth percentiles are also highly associated with initial scores
– higher initial average scores are positively associated with higher
growth. So, getting grads into relatively higher performing schools
might be advantageous.

With a little statistical savvy, a few good scatteplots, one can
easily mine the biases of any state’s student growth metrics to
determine how to best game them in support of CAEP standard 4.1.

Further, because it is nearly if not entirely impossible to use these
data to legitimately compare program effects, the best one can do is to
find the most advantageous illegitimate approach.

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

An attorney representing a family bent out of shape over a public
school yoga program in the beach city of Encinitas filed a lawsuit
Wednesday to stop the district-wide classes.

In the lawsuit filed in San Diego Superior Court, attorney Dean
Broyles argued that the twice weekly, 30-minute classes are inherently
religious, in violation of the separation between church and state.
The plaintiffs are Stephen and Jennifer Sedlock and their children, who are students in the Encinitas Union School District.

"EUSD's Ashtanga yoga program represents a serious breach of the
public trust," Broyles said.
"Compliance with the clear requirements of
law is not optional or discretionary. This is frankly the clearest case
of the state trampling on the religious freedom rights of citizens that I
have personally witnessed in my 18 years of practice as a
constitutional attorney."

Superintendent Timothy B. Baird said he had not seen the lawsuit and
could not directly comment on it, but he defended the district's
decision to integrate yoga into its curriculum this year.

The district is believed to be the first in the country to have
full-time yoga teachers at every one of its schools. The lessons are
funded by a $533,000, three-year grant from the Jois Foundation, a
nonprofit group that promotes Asthanga yoga. Since the district started
the classes at its nine schools in January, Baird said teachers and
parents have noticed students are calmer, using the breathing practices
to release stress before tests.

"We're not teaching religion," he said. "We teach a very mainstream
physical fitness program that happens to incorporate yoga into it. It's
part of our overall wellness program. The vast majority of students and
parents support it."

Baird said the lawsuit would not deter the district from offering the classes.

Broyles said his clients took legal action after the district refused
to take their complaints into account. He said the Sedlocks are not
seeking monetary damages but are asking the court to intervene and
suspend the program.

The
lawsuit notes Harvard-educated religious studies professor Candy
Gunther Brown found the district's program is pervasively religious,
having its roots in Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist and metaphysical beliefs and
practices...

The University Of Wisconsin-Superior has announced that, despite
criticism, the school intends to continue its support for the "Un-Fair"
campaign, a local advertising effort to raise awareness of and fight
misconceptions about racism.

UW-Superior said
in a statement released last week that the school is "proud to host the
diversity dialogues" as a partner in the Un-Fair campaign, and will
work to "reshape the message" to avoid alienating anyone in the
community.

"We have an obligation to engage in difficult conversations about
complex, even controversial social issues, with a goal of finding
workable solutions," the UW-Superior statement reads.

"In fact, the campus is part of a coalition of 16 third-party
community sponsors," the statement reads. "That coalition includes a
wide range of education, civic, religious, and service organizations."
According to the Un-Fair campaign's website, it was conceived in 2011
by a committee of the Duluth YWCA and a local ad agency. Since then,
it's added local churches, the NAACP, community groups and Lake Superior
College as campaign partners.

The campaign's stated mission
is to "raise awareness about white privilege in our community," and the
tagline reads "It's hard to see racism when you're White."

"We swim in a sea of whiteness -- it's the norm," Ellen O'Neill, one of the campaign organizers, told Minnesota Public Radio in January of last year. "If we're white, we don't have to think about it, we don't see it. So the first step is getting white people to see it."

The News Tribune reported at the time that Mayor Don Ness had
received complaints about the ads from "fair number of people in the
community," and quoted area resident Ann Reyelts as saying the ads were
"poorly conceived."

"To assume that it's hard for whites to understand racism is
insulting to my intelligence," Reyelts told the paper. "I get what
they're trying to say, but I don't think that's the way to go about it."

MPR reports that a 2010 survey of local residents
"found Duluth residents viewed the city as less hospitable to racial
and ethnic minorities, immigrants, young adults without children, and
talented college graduates looking for work than other comparable
cities."

A small group of
Washington policy wonks is increasingly pessimistic that the two big
state assessment consortia are headed for success. That's the key
finding of a survey released today by the consulting group Whiteboard Advisors.

Bear in mind that this survey takes the pulse of a really small
group, and it's hardly reflective of the country in general. The group
surveyed is 50 to 75 "Washington insiders"—people like current and
former Congressional staffers, White House and U.S. Department of
Education officials, and the heads of major organizations—so you've got
to see it for what it isn't, as well as for what it is.

Since it isn't nationally representative, the survey is notable less
as a reflection of general sentiment than for the way it tracks those
"Washington insiders'" views across time. And the latest findings show a
downward trend in warm-and-fuzzy vibes about the two federally funded
test-design groups, the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC.

The story starts on page 9 of the survey.
The graph on that page shows that last April, only 27 percent of the
"insiders" thought PARCC was on the wrong track. Now that's up to 52
percent. Smarter Balanced's numbers have sunk by only 6 percentage
points since last April, but they were more heavily "on the wrong track"
to begin with than was PARCC. Seventy-one percent saw SBAC as off-base
last April, and optimism grew for a while last summer. But now the
"wrong track" numbers are up to 77 percent.

Page 10 shows a sampling of why respondents think what they do. There
is some praise for the work: one respondent, for instance, appears to
think that PARCC's sample test items reflect a rigorous and promising
assessment. But others are worried about the tests being delivered on
time, and troubles—both internal and external—that could cause the
consortia to stumble.

Flipping through the survey to page 17, you can see this pessimism
play out in a different way. Nearly 9 in 10 of those surveyed predict
that more states will drop out of the consortia in the coming year, the
way Alabama and Utah did
earlier this year. Page 19 captures an already-well-documented worry:
that schools and districts lack the necessary technology to administer
computer-based tests to all students.

Friday, February 22, 2013

Committed to Excellence:

The Story of the Prichard Committee

Committed to Excellence is a documentary honoring the work of the
Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence, a nonpartisan, nonprofit,
independent citizens' advocacy group made up of volunteer parents and
citizens from around Kentucky, on the occasion of its 20th anniversary
in 2003. This is an edited version. (Originally produced and directed by
Diana J. Taylor) Length: 00:09:55 First aired in its original version:
June 29, 2003.

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Students may be asked to submit a 15-page typed research paper, an
original short story, or a handwritten essay on the historical figure
they would most like to meet. There are interviews. Exams. And pages of
questions for parents to answer, including: How do you intend to help
this school if we admit your son or daughter?

These aren't college applications. They're applications for seats at charter schools.

Charters are public schools, funded by taxpayers and widely promoted
as open to all. But Reuters has found that across the United States,
charters aggressively screen student applicants, assessing their
academic records, parental support, disciplinary history, motivation,
special needs and even their citizenship, sometimes in violation of
state and federal law.

"I didn't get the sense that was what charter schools were all about -
we'll pick the students who are the most motivated? Who are going to
make our test scores look good?" said Michelle Newman, whose 8-year-old
son lost his seat in an Ohio charter school last fall after he did
poorly on an admissions test. "It left a bad taste in my mouth."

Set up as alternatives to traditional public schools, charter schools
typically operate under private management and often boast small class
sizes, innovative teaching styles or a particular academic focus.
They're booming: There are now more than 6,000 in the United States, up
from 2,500 a decade ago, educating a record 2.3 million children.

In cities and suburbs from Pennsylvania to Colorado to Arizona,
charters and traditional public schools are locked in fierce competition
- for students, for funding and for their very survival, with outcomes
often hinging on student test scores.

Charter advocates say it's a fair fight because both types of schools
are free and open to all. "That's a bedrock principle of our movement,"
said Jed Wallace, president of the California Charter Schools
Association. And indeed, many states require charter schools to award
seats by random lottery.
But as Reuters has found, it's not that simple. Thousands of charter
schools don't provide subsidized lunches, putting them out of reach for
families in poverty. Hundreds mandate that parents spend hours doing
"volunteer" work for the school or risk losing their child's seat. In
one extreme example the Cambridge Lakes Charter School in Pingree Grove,
Illinois, mandates that each student's family invest in the company
that built the school - a practice the state said it would investigate
after inquiries from Reuters.

ARRAY OF BARRIERS

And from New Hampshire to California, charter schools large and
small, honored and obscure, have developed complex application processes
that can make it tough for students who struggle with disability,
limited English skills, academic deficits or chaotic family lives to
even get into the lottery.
Among the barriers that Reuters documented:

* Applications that are made available just a few hours a year.
* Lengthy application forms, often printed only in English, that
require student and parent essays, report cards, test scores,
disciplinary records, teacher recommendations and medical records.
* Demands that students present Social Security cards and birth
certificates for their applications to be considered, even though such
documents cannot be required under federal law.
* Mandatory family interviews.
* Assessment exams.
* Academic prerequisites.
* Requirements that applicants document any disabilities or special
needs. The U.S. Department of Education considers this practice illegal
on the college level but has not addressed the issue for K-12 schools.

Many charters, backed by state law, specialize in serving low-income
and minority children. Some of the best-known charter networks, such as
KIPP, Yes Prep, Green Dot and Success Academy, use simple application
forms that ask little more than name, grade and contact information, and
actively seek out disadvantaged families. Most for-profit charter
school chains also keep applications brief.
But stand-alone charters, which account for more than half the total
in the United States, make up their own admissions policies. Regulations
are often vague, oversight is often lax - and principals can get quite
creative.

When Philadelphia officials examined 25 charter schools last spring,
they found 18 imposed "significant barriers," including a requirement
from one school that students produce a character reference from a
religious or community leader.

At Northland Preparatory Academy in Flagstaff, Arizona, application
forms are available just four and a half hours a year. Parents must
attend one of three information sessions to pick up a form; late
arrivals can't get in. "It's kind of like a time share (pitch)," said
Bob Lombardi, the superintendent. "You have to come and listen."

Traditional public schools have their own built-in barriers to
admission, starting with zip code: You don't have to write an essay to
get into a high-performing suburban school, but you do have to belong to
a household with the means to buy or rent in that neighborhood. Many
districts also operate magnet or exam schools for gifted students, some
of which admit disproportionately fewer low-income and minority
students.

Yet most of the charter schools that screen do not set themselves up
as elite academies for the gifted. They bill themselves as open to all.
For two decades, that promise of accessibility and equity has been the
mantra of the charter school movement. It's proved a potent political
argument as well, as advocates have pressed to expand the number of
charters and their share of public funding.

"TALKING POINT"

Open access "is an easy and popular talking point," said Frederick
Hess, director of education policy studies at the conservative American
Enterprise Institute. There's just one problem, Hess said: It's not
true.

"There's a level of institutional hypocrisy here which is actually
unhealthy," said Hess, who is a strong advocate of charter schools.
"It's a strange double game. Charter advocates say, 'No, no, no, we
don't believe in (selective admissions),' but when you see a successful
charter school, it's filled with families who are a good fit and who
want to be there, and that's not possible when you have a random
assortment of kids."

Five states - Florida, Louisiana, New Hampshire, Ohio and Texas -
explicitly permit certain charter schools to screen applicants by
academic performance. Most others do not. Yet schools have found
loopholes.

Alaska, Delaware and North Carolina, for instance, permit charter
schools to give admissions preference to students who demonstrate
interest in their particular educational focus. Some schools use that
leeway to screen for students who are ready for advanced math classes or
have stellar standardized test scores.

In California, the law sounds straightforward enough: "A charter
school shall admit all pupils who wish to attend the school," with seats
awarded by lottery if demand exceeds capacity.

Yet Roseland Accelerated Middle School, a charter school in Santa
Rosa, California, won't even enter applicants into the lottery until
they have proved their mettle by writing a five-page autobiography (with
no errors in grammar or spelling, the form warns), as well as a long
essay and six short essays. Applicants also must provide
recommendations, report cards and statements from their parents or
guardians and submit a medical history, including a list of all
medications they take.

Gail Ahlas, superintendent of the public school district that
oversees the charter, says the process isn't meant to exclude anyone,
but to "set the tone" for the school as a rigorous college-prep
environment. The form does not offer any accommodation for students with
special needs or limited English skills, but Ahlas said she is
confident the process "has not been a gatekeeper" and "absolutely"
complies with state law.

Ahlas is hardly alone in interpreting California law as flexible. One
charter high school in the state will not consider applicants with less
than a 2.0 grade point average. Another will only admit students who
passed Algebra I in middle school with a grade of B or better.

Julie Russell, who runs the state's Charter Schools Division, said
she is not sure how, or whether, such policies square with the
open-admissions law. "It's not real, real clear," she said. She relies
on each school's overseer to make sure it is in compliance, she said.

In California, as in most states, oversight of charter schools
primarily rests with local "authorizers" - typically a school district, a
university, or a community group. Authorizers review policies, monitor
academic progress and make sure the schools under their jurisdiction
comply with state and federal law.

The National Association of Charter School Authorizers informs
members that one of their core responsibilities is making sure schools
are open to all, said Alex Medler, a vice president of the group.
"That's non-negotiable," he said.

OVERSIGHT ISSUES

Medler acknowledged that many authorizers have fallen down on the
job. They may approve vague admissions policies without demanding
details. They may not have the expertise to spot problems. Or they may
relax supervision over time, so they don't even notice when a school
adds criteria that can help charters weed out less-than-desirable
students.

Hawthorne Math and Science Academy, a top-rated charter school
outside of Los Angeles, uses a multistep application that requires
assessment exams in math and English and a family interview.

Principal Esau Berumen said he does not screen prospective students
for academic ability. But, he said, the process is demanding enough that
about 10 percent drop out before the lottery - leaving him with a pool
of kids he knows are motivated to embrace the rigors of his curriculum.

"If there's any skimming off the top, it's on effort and drive," Berumen said.

The academy's authorizer, the local school district, did not return calls and emails seeking comment.

To some parents, screening applicants makes sense, given the limited
number of seats at top charter schools. "Where do we want to put scarce
resources? Find the kids who will benefit most," said Judy Bushnell, a
San Diego mother who is seeking to get her 12-year-old daughter into a
charter school.
Other parents, however, feel unfairly shut out.

Shortly after the school year began this fall, Michelle Newman got a
call from The Intergenerational Charter School in Cleveland, Ohio. A
spot had opened up in a third-grade classroom, and her 8-year-old son,
Lucas, was first on the waiting list. Administrators said he could
enroll after he took an exam.

The exam, part of a two-hour assessment, included questions drawn
from state standardized tests. It didn't go well. Lucas was still in
summer vacation mode and balked at some math problems, his mother said.

Still, she said she was shocked when the principal called a few days
later to say Lucas could not enroll because staff had determined that he
wasn't academically or developmentally ready for third-grade - even
though he was enrolled in the third grade at his local public school,
where he remains.

Charter schools say they take everyone, "but they didn't take him," Newman said. "It's not really about educating all children."

Eric McGarvey, admissions coordinator for Intergenerational, said the
school assesses applicants through testing, an interview and a
report-card review because "we don't want to accept a child into a grade
level that they're not ready for. It doesn't do them any justice."
Students who are rejected, he said, go to the top of the waiting list
for the grade teachers deem appropriate.

A spokesman for the Ohio Department of Education said charter schools
are obligated to admit students into the grade they would attend at
their neighborhood school, regardless of skill. The community authorizer
that supervises Intergenerational Charter said that it is confident the
school's admissions policy is legal but that it will review the policy.

SCARCE RESOURCES

Though admissions barriers most directly affect individual students,
the stakes are high for public education nationwide. Funding for charter
schools comes primarily from the states, so as charters expand, less
money is left for traditional public schools. Teachers unions have
fought the proliferation of charters because they see the schools, which
typically employ non-union teachers, as a drain on traditional public
schools.

Charter-school advocates say the shift in resources is warranted
because charters often excel where traditional schools have failed,
posting stellar test scores even in impoverished neighborhoods with
little history of academic success.

But a growing number of education experts - including some staunch
fans of charter schools - see that narrative as flawed. They point to
application barriers at some charter schools and high expulsion rates at
others as evidence that the charter sector as a whole may be skimming
the most motivated, disciplined students and leaving the
hardest-to-reach behind.

That, in turn, can drive down test scores and enrollment at
traditional public schools. In Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Chicago
and other cities, officials have cited just such trends as justification
for closing scores of neighborhood schools to make way for still more
charters.

"At some point, the slow leak of the most motivated students and
families can put traditional schools in a downward spiral they can't
recover from," said Jeffrey Henig, an education professor at Teachers
College at Columbia University in New York.

Even when charter schools use simple applications, the fact that
parents must submit them months before the start of school means that
"these students are in some ways more advantaged, come from more
motivated families" than kids in nearby district schools, education
analyst Michael Petrilli said.
"We're talking about different populations," said Petrilli, executive
vice president at the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute and
longtime advocate of charter schools.

A federal report released last summer found that charter schools
across the United States enroll significantly fewer special-needs
students than district schools.

In New York City and Newark, New Jersey, high-achieving charter
networks enroll markedly fewer poor, severely disabled and
English-as-a-second-language students than district schools, according
to an analysis by Bruce Baker, an education professor at Rutgers
University.

STUDY IN CONTRASTS

Such differences are visible in San Francisco, at a charter school and a district school less than a mile apart.

At Gateway High, a well-regarded charter, 36 percent of students
qualify for subsidized lunch because of low income. At the district high
school, 66 percent do, according to state data. Just 5 percent of
Gateway's students are still learning English, compared with 14 percent
at the district high school. And the parents at Gateway are better
educated: Nearly half are college graduates, compared to 29 percent at
the nearby school.

Gateway requires applicants and their parents to answer four pages of
questions, responding to prompts such as "My best qualities are ..."
and "When I graduate from high school, I hope ..."

Gateway's executive director, Sharon Olken, said the point is to get
families thinking about whether the school is right for them; applicants
are not judged by their writing skills or even the content of their
essays. The application does not explain that, however, and even though
they're allowed to write in their native language, some families with
limited English skills are intimidated.

"Oh my God, it was a nightmare!" said Daisy Hernandez, a native
Spanish speaker who made it through the forms only with help from her
son, who was determined to apply. He got in.

The school's authorizer, the San Francisco Unified School District,
has reviewed the application and is confident Gateway "maintains a
consistent effort to reach and serve a diverse population," spokeswoman
Gentle Blythe said.

It can be hard, however, to assess with any rigor whether application
barriers deter students from applying. Education lawyers in several
cities said parents shut out of the process rarely go public with their
complaints out of concern for their children's privacy. Others see
obstacles as deeply frustrating - but hardly a reason to file a lawsuit
or lodge a formal protest with the state.

When Heather Davis-Jones sought to enroll her eight-year-old
daughter, Shakia, in a charter school in Philadelphia last year, she
found it much harder than she expected to get into admissions lotteries.

One school made its application available just one night a year;
Davis-Jones had to leave work early, forfeiting income, to pick it up.
Others demanded birth certificates and other records that Davis-Jones,
who adopted her daughter from foster care, did not have and could not
get.

Yet it never occurred to Davis-Jones to complain. "I was like, 'This
is insane,' " she said. "But I felt like I needed to do whatever it took
to get her into a better school. If they want me to stand on my hands
for 10 days, I'll do it." Her daughter got into one of the charter
schools and loves it.

"MY CHILD'S RIGHT"

Another Philadelphia mother, Erika Trujillo, did find the courage to
call a charter school and seek clarification when the application
required a Social Security card to get her son in the lottery. An
immigrant, she did not have that document.

"I was angry," Trujillo said. "It's my child's right to receive an education even though he was born in Mexico."

Federal law requires public schools to admit all resident children,
including non-citizens and illegal immigrants. When Trujillo confronted
them, school administrators acknowledged that right and said her son
could enter the lottery without a Social Security card. But other
parents have no way to know that; application forms at that school - and
scores of other charter schools around the country - still indicate
that a Social Security number is required.

When authorizers or regulators spot improprieties in a charter school's application process, they can demand changes.

In 2011, New York City put Academic Leadership Charter School on
probation for irregularities, including leaving hundreds of applicants
out of the lottery. (The school has changed its practices and is now
acting with integrity, a spokesman for the city's education department
said.) This fall, the charter school board in Washington, D.C., moved to
shut down Imagine Southeast Charter School for various failings,
including inappropriate questions about race and nationality on the
application form.
Yet regulators are sometimes unclear on how to interpret the law.

Wyoming, for instance, expressly prohibits charter schools from
discriminating against students with special needs in enrollment
decisions. Yet Arapaho Charter High School in Riverton requires
applicants to write eight short essays, on topics such as "What does the
word 'commitment' mean to you?" Each student must also ask an adult
mentor to answer another five essay questions.

Principal Mel Miller said he doesn't turn away any student who
completes the application, no matter their skill level. He acknowledges,
however, that some teens take one look at the form and decide the
school is not for them.

Asked whether the process could be considered discriminatory against
students with learning disabilities or limited English skills, Elaine
Marces, a consultant to the state Department of Education on charter
school issues, said she did not know. "That's actually a really good
question," she said. "We've not monitored it in the past. Maybe it's
something we should be looking at."

The superintendent of the local school district, which oversees the
charter school, at first said he was "100 percent confident" the
application was permissible under state law. Yet asked whether
disadvantaged students might be shut out, Superintendent Jonathan Braack
said he was not sure. "This makes me want to look into it," he said.

A 23-PAGE HURDLE

Authorizers also plan to look closely at possible admissions barriers
at the Preuss School at the University of California, San Diego.

Preuss has earned a reputation as one of the best charters in the
United States, hailed by Newsweek magazine as a "miracle high school."
It serves only low-income students whose parents don't have a four-year
college degree.

Yet within that demographic, the school screens aggressively for aptitude, drive and parental support.
The 23-page application requires students to hand-write a long essay
and several short-answer questions. They must submit a graded writing
sample from their old school, and then explain what they learned from
the assignment and how they could have done better. They must provide
three recommendations.

And their parents must respond to a page of questions, including:
"Describe what type of service you will contribute to this school.
Please be specific." If they don't speak English, parents are asked to
secure help from a translator.

The school's charter is up for review this summer and its authorizer,
the San Diego Unified School District, plans to scrutinize the
application process, said Moises Aguirre, who oversees charter schools
for the district. "We are interested in equity," he said.

Preuss School Principal Scott Barton said the application is designed
to ensure that every child competing for scarce seats in the lottery
has "the motivation and the potential to succeed."

Barton said he typically tosses out a few applicants before the
lottery - those who have poor recommendations or show only lukewarm
interest in Preuss. But he says everyone else who completes the packet
goes into the lottery. "We don't cherry pick," he said. "We're certainly
not judging the application by grammar or those kinds of things."
That wasn't clear to Teresa Villanueva.

Applying this past fall for a seat for her 11-year-old daughter,
Villanueva, who speaks little English, couldn't understand some of the
parent questions and was afraid she would disqualify her daughter with
clumsy responses. She turned to staff at her daughter's after-school
program to guide her through, line by line. To her joy, her daughter got
in.

"Thank God I had the help," Villanueva said. "If I was on my own, I wouldn't have been able to do it."

President Barack Obama was in Decatur, Ga., on Thursday to promote his
education agenda that he announced on Tuesday's State of the Union. He
stopped in at the College Heights Early Childhood Learning Center.

Until Saturday, none of the school board members responded individually to Holliday’s comments. (More on that later on in this blog post).
But last night, newly-elected school board member David Jones Jr. took
to Facebook and addressed the situation, saying that the “honeymoon is
over” and that the “events of the past week need to be a wake-up call to
JCPS and to the school board.” Here is his full statement:

Well, the honeymoon for new school board members is over.

The events of the past week need to be a wake-up call to JCPS and to
the school board. How we as a board manage our business, what we spend
our time debating, what questions we ask, and especially what
expectations we demonstrate all make a difference.

The District has been reorganized under Superintendent Hargens’
leadership in a concerted effort to improve student achievement; as a
board, we must take a page from that book and reorganize our work to
show the same urgent commitment to improvement that we’re demanding from
JCPS educators.

While my colleagues and I are personally repelled by Commissioner
Terry Holliday’s choice of words, it’s time to let go of that and face
the bigger issue: What are we doing to turn the tide so all students
receive the education they desperately need to be functional adults in
an economy that will continue to demand more from them?

Since joining the board I’ve learned a lot that I didn’t know about
Dr. Hargens’ reorganization of the District, and about changes that are
beginning to take effect. But there’s no question these changes have not
yet fixed our weakest schools. We must do far more to explain planned
changes to the community and engage parents in their kids’ education,
while seeking the help of every Louisvillian to push our students to
succeed – and supporting them as that happens.

Our schools are teaching students to approach problem solving with
high-level, critical thinking skills. If we embrace those same skill
sets we can – and will – effectively address the crisis of persistently
low-achieving schools.

I’m pleased that the board is united on the urgency of turning around
our weakest schools by energetically implementing Dr. Hargens’
turnaround plan. But we can and must do more to show the community the
change that’s underway – and that we’re ready to try new things if this
plan doesn’t work. Passively waiting for state data, and then reporting
it to Louisville parents and voters, just won’t do.

So – I’m repelled by Dr. Holliday’s word choice, but I welcome his
heat. I want adults to model reasonable discourse, which is what we’re
trying to teach our kids, but I also know that candor is essential to
fixing any problem, and that passion in pursuit of a lofty goal is no
vice.

Now, let’s get to the back story of that “unified” school board statement and how that came about.

On Thursday, The Courier-Journal decided to poll all seven
members of the school board and ask them each several questions about
the district’s persistently low-achieving schools. I made several phone
calls to board members, but could not reach any of them by Thursday
afternoon, so I decided I would send them an email with some of my
questions, so that they would be prepared to talk to me.

Here is the email that I sent to the JCPS school board members at 4:08 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 14:

JCPS school board members:
I am working on a weekend story where I need to speak with all seven
of you and ask you a few questions about the events/comments that have
unfolded in the past week in regards to Jefferson County’s persistently
low-achieving schools. This story is strictly about the school board and
what each member feels, not the school district or Donna Hargens.

I have tried to call some of you by phone and have left messages. I
decided I will email you my questions ahead of time so you can look at
them and have some time to think about them before we talk about it, but
I am working on a tight deadline. I need to speak with you by 1 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 15, 2013. If you don’t believe you can meet that deadline, please let me know ASAP! Thanks.

Here are the questions:1)What is your reaction to Education Commissioner Terry Holliday’s characterization that the lack of progress at Jefferson County’s priority schools is tantamount to “academic genocide?”2 )Is JCPS correctly handling oversight of the PLAs? Do you feel the district is doing everything it needs to help students at these schools? 3 ) What are the
implications of the state’s warning that it might take over oversight at
some of the district’s priority schools? Is it warranted, and will it
improve those schools turnaround?
4) Please read over the following paragraphs from my article in Wednesday’s newspaper:

Asked Tuesday if Jefferson County had created a system with two different levels of expectations, Holliday agreed.

“Some have suggested that I should have used the word ‘apartheid,’
because I think that is exactly what has happened,” he said. “You have
two very different systems in Jefferson County, and the data would
support what you’re saying.“

Holliday said he hopes the school board will start asking important
questions to ensure “not just equity of opportunity,” but that there is
“equity of learning outcomes for all children.”

I knew each board member had opened my email because of return
receipts I had attached to my note, but by Thursday evening, I had only
been contacted by three of them – Diane Porter, who
had returned my earlier phone call but had not read my email, so I asked
her to read my email and then to let me know when we could discuss my
questions; Linda Duncan, who emailed to say she could talk later on that night or on Friday afternoon and Chuck Haddaway, who emailed to say he was sick with the flu and would be unable to respond to my questions.

I heard nothing by my deadline of 1 p.m. on Friday from any of the
school board members. At 1:04 p.m., JCPS spokesman Ben Jackey called me
to tell me that the school board would be issuing a statement shortly
and to be on the lookout for that statement.

I was caught off guard initially because I did not send my questions
to the district. The school board is elected — they don’t report to
Superintendent Donna Hargens or her staff. I wasn’t looking for a
response from the district and I wondered why the board would not
contact me directly, either by phone or via email, instead of through
the district’s communication department. Jackey told me that he was
simply asked to forward the statement on to me.

The statement did not arrive in my inbox until 3:25 P.M. on Friday.
It was a direct response to my questions and it was sent out to the
other media in town as well.

When I asked Diane Porter, who is the school board
chairwoman, why individual school board members did not respond to me,
she said it was because two school board members (who she would not
name) felt it would be best for the board to respond as a whole. She
said the statement was written with input from all board members, with
the exception of Haddaway who was sick, but that Haddaway had signed off on it.

As of today (Sunday), only two of the school board members have contacted me in regards to my original email – Linda Duncan and Debbie Wesslund, but neither have elaborated beyond the board’s “unified” statement. I’ve left numerous messages for the others, including Jones, to no avail.

If and when I see or hear any other individual responses to my
questions (either directly or indirectly) from other school board
members, I will be sure to let you know.

KSN&C

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KSN&C is intended to be a place for well-reasoned civil discourse...not to suggest that we don’t appreciate the witty retort or pithy observation. Have at it. But we do not invite the anonymous flaming too often found in social media these days. This is a destination for folks to state your name and speak your piece.

It is important to note that, while the Moderator serves as Faculty Regent for Eastern Kentucky University, all comments offered by the Moderator on KSN&C are his own opinions and do not necessarily represent the views of the Board of Regents, the university administration, faculty, or any members of the university community.

On KSN&C, all authors are responsible for their own comments. See full disclaimer at the bottom of the page.

Why This Blog?

So far as we know, we only get one lifetime. So, when I "retired" in 2004, after 31-years in public education I wanted to do something different. I wanted to teach, write and become a student again. I have since spent a decade in higher ed.

I have listened to so many commentaries over the years about what should be done to improve Kentucky's schools - written largely by folks who have never tried to manage a classroom, run a school, or close an achievement gap. I came to believe that I might have something to offer.

I moved, in 1985, from suburban northern Kentucky to what was then the state’s flagship district - Fayette County. I have had a unique set of experiences to accompany my journey through KERA’s implementation. I have seen children grow to graduate and lead successful lives. I have seen them go to jail and I have seen them die. I have been amazed by brilliant teachers, dismayed by impassive bureaucrats, disappointed by politicians and uplifted by some of Kentucky’s finest school children. When I am not complaining about it, I will attest that public school administration is critically important work.

Democracy is run by those who show up. In our system of government every citizen has a voice, but only if they choose to use it.

This blog is totally independent; not supported or sponsored by any institution or political organization. I will make every effort to fully cite (or link to) my sources. Please address any concerns to the author.

On the campaign trail...with my wife Rita

An action shot: The Principal...as a much younger man.

Faculty Senate Chair

Serving as Mace Bearer during the Inauguration of Michael T. Benson as EKU's 12th president.

Teaching

EDF 203 in EKU's one-room schoolhouse.

Professin'

Lecturing on the history of Berea College to Berea faculty and staff, 2014.

Faculty Regent

One in a long series of meetings. 2016

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